‍At Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut – we make space for grief so we can embrace joy.

I want to talk about something that still trips people up every year: how we go from Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzmaut in what feels like a single breath.

One day, we’re mourning the soldiers and civilians we lost. And then the siren ends, and within hours, there are fireworks. People who haven’t experienced this transition before sometimes find it offensive. Like we moved on too fast. Like we didn’t mean it.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe –

The transition isn’t despite the grief.

It’s because of it.

There’s a recording I keep coming back to. April 1945. Bergen-Belsen, five days after liberation. A BBC reporter captured a few hundred survivors singing Hatikvah at an open-air Shabbat service. The bodies of their friends, family, and neighbors hadn’t all been cleared yet. People were still dying around them as they sang.

The reporter described it: the people gathered were sobbing openly, with joy at their liberation and with sorrow for the parents and brothers and sisters who had been taken from them. He said they made a tremendous effort, which left them quite exhausted. They knew they were being recorded, and they wanted the world to hear their voice.

In the recording, the opening notes are unsteady, frayed; the melody dragging itself up from the ground. Then, on the words nefesh yehudi, “Jewish soul,” one woman’s voice sharpens and leads. By the time they reach od lo avdah tikvateinu, “Our hope is not lost,” the octave jump is clean and confident. You can even hear one voice split off to harmonize.

That is not survival. That is something else entirely.

Those survivors weren’t singing because the grief was over. Grief was everywhere, literally, physically surrounding them. They were singing because something in them understood, maybe without words, that to stay only in survival mode was to let the camps win one more time. The song wasn’t an escape from what happened; it was a refusal to be defined only by what had happened to them.

That’s what Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut together are doing. Yom Hazikaron holds the grief fully; it demands you feel it, in community, without softening it. That matters, because grief that isn’t witnessed tends to get stuck, to spread, to make celebration feel like betrayal. But once grief is held and seen, something can shift, and the body can begin to move again.

Then comes Yom Ha’atzmaut. In Israel, the shift happens in a moment: the siren ends, the radio changes, and the streets fill, not gradually, but all at once. That abruptness is the point. Joy, real joy, doesn’t ease in; it breaks throughIf you’ve never spent Yom Ha’atzmautin Israel, it’s hard to describe. Families pour into every park and hilltop and the smell of grilled meat is everywhere. Strangers spray each other with silly string, and children run around with squeaky plastic hammers. It is, on the surface, completely undignified, and that’s exactly right. Dignity had its day yesterday; today belongs to something looser, louder, and more alive.

The dancing in the streets isn’t incidental; it’s the whole statement. People who were told, generation after generation, that they had no future, no land, no sovereignty, no right to exist as a people are dancing in their own streets, in their own country, under their own flag. The joy isn’t naïve; we know exactly what it costs. That’s what makes it so fierce.

Yom Ha’atzmaut isn’t us forgetting the people we lost; it is us proving that what they died for is still here. The dancing isn’t moving on; it’s the answer to the question they gave everything to ask.

Many of us in this community carry both at once, a loss and a celebration, grief and gratitude, living side by side. That’s not a contradiction; that’s just what a full life looks like. These holidays don’t resolve that tension. They show us how to live inside it.

Yom Hazikaron v’Yom Ha’atzmaut Sameach.

Todd Polikoff

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